PsyLord:Waah! My school is no longer giving a free ride to their new students. Waah! Seriously, did they really think that the university can sustain that? What utopia do they believe they are living in?

They did sustain it, for decades, by operating off a generous initial endowment and restricting themselves to a tiny no-frills campus. Then a greedy idiot became president of the college and tried Unfettered Capitalism, and reduced the budget to a smoking crater. Again, go read the Times article:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/business/how-cooper-unions-endowmen t -failed-in-its-mission.htm

"But teh sustainable endless growth and teh no hows will save us cause the eagle of freedom and oil and, sh*t look what Job guy did!". Capitalism is a component. It is unsustainable as a religion. A lot of things are. This is due to something called "physics".

And I thought our tuition hike this Fall was bad at 18.5% increase, making our total tuition increase 24.325% in less than 12 months.

If you're not a STEM major, then really, seriously, question why you're in college, especially if you or your parents are paying out of pocket. My school's largest departments are Criminal Justice and Business, followed by Humanities. Income potential= pffffbtbbbbtbbbbtt

But as a business model- promising a future to children while knowing there aren't enough positions at Taco Bell for another acountant, or English major, seems to be working as they rake in money hand over fist.

Where the money goes is the problem: grossly inefficient administration which constantly violates Federal Law at the expense of the student body.

My school is what happens when you let the dumber college grads run things. MBA's lined up to work for $12/hr shuffling papers, and acting smug. Brilliant.

Meesterjojo:My school is what happens when you let the dumber college grads run things. MBA's lined up to work for $12/hr shuffling papers, and acting smug. Brilliant.

And if you think about it, all but inevitable. Only a dolt would smugly grin at the prospect of a "career" where they get to wear a snappy suit every day and "never have to lift anything heavier than a file storage box full of hard copies or a mouse", and assume they'll never get bored out of their skulls. Guess which end of the bell curve can happily do incredibly numbing, repetitive bullsh*t every day without succumbing to ennui?

bunner:PunGent: Buddy of mine just got out of a private sector situation where one of the VPs spent the last two years...and nearly ten million dollars...trashing the old computer system everyone relied on and replacing it with one his pet consultants built from scratch.

Naturally, it doesn't work as well, has fewer features and more bugs, and they've had to let people go to pay for it, and work the remaining ones harder to make up for the inefficiency.

You know how, like, you'd be sitting in a bar hanging out, listening to the conversations and some guy would say "Well, you know, it's not what you know, it's who you blow"? And you'd chuckle and say, internally. "Well, yeah, but not -really-"? Well, yeah. It is. And fatassed, pigsh*t thick, well connected dullards are regularly rewarded for taking a big fat dump on stuff they don't understand because their cronies made a buck off of it. And until we find a way to start throwing these dolts and their patrons out of the nearest 30th floor window, college is pretty much a piss up a rope, regardless of your degree.

Scary thing is, an older brother of another buddy of mine, an engineer by training, found out the hard way that kind of shiat goes on inside nuclear power plants, where you'd think they'd at least try to reign in the MBA-tards out of self-preservation, if nothing else...

Shame on Cooper Union's administration and board for so grossly mismanaging finances as to run the school into the ground, and now making the students pay for what they have done. Are any of those administrators taking a pay cut? Didn't think so.

They have violated Peter Cooper's mission. If they are to charge tuition, then the school needs to be called something else as it is no longer Cooper Union. Where once students were selected based on merit alone, the school will now join the mediocre ranks of any other for-profit institution.

cheesewheel:Shame on Cooper Union's administration and boardthe entirety of corporate America and the banking industryfor so grossly mismanaging finances as to run the schooleconomy into the ground, and now making the students people who actually work for a living pay for what they have done.

That IS the new business model. Academia just decided to get in on the pork before Wall St. lapped it all up.

bunner:Meesterjojo: My school is what happens when you let the dumber college grads run things. MBA's lined up to work for $12/hr shuffling papers, and acting smug. Brilliant.

And if you think about it, all but inevitable. Only a dolt would smugly grin at the prospect of a "career" where they get to wear a snappy suit every day and "never have to lift anything heavier than a file storage box full of hard copies or a mouse", and assume they'll never get bored out of their skulls. Guess which end of the bell curve can happily do incredibly numbing, repetitive bullsh*t every day without succumbing to ennui?

According to most studies, it's the person with the most money that is generally the happiest, regardless of the day-to-day job they do. Managers tend to be well compensated, and are some of the more genuinely happy people. On the other hand, some people have jobs that are nothing but manual labor, day in day out, literally leaving them covered in sweat, exhausted, and often injured - sometimes permanently - in their job, and they're happy. Granted, we're mostly talking about sports professionals, but there you go.

As far as MBA's go, they're a pretty good ROI with manageable risk. Most white collar jobs are like that because they focus on your intellectual skill set instead of your physical capabilities. Manual jobs - like being an NFL quarterback - might be lucrative, but they have short durations (comparatively), and there's a high risk you won't make that goal.

Besides, what's the alternative? I haven't heard of many dolts smugly grinning about their jobs as they wait for the timer to go off as they flip and salt the next batch of fries. That's the lower end of the bell curve that doesn't get the choice to pick any other type of job.

quietwalker:Most white collar jobs are like that because they focus on your intellectual skill set

And so far these captains of industry have gotten us.. here? I sort of doubt that Stanford Binet scores are the top shopping metric when checking the teeth on the latest crop of corporate whore wannabes.

Honesty? Decency? Value for dollar as a goal other than a nuisance to the quarterly P&L?

quietwalker:hat's the lower end of the bell curve that doesn't get the choice to pick any other type of job.

PhDs with spatulas are prolix. It may be a comfort to assure oneself that you have the GOOD treadmill cause "I'm one of the smart ones!", but the state of the con speaks to other qualities being necessary to skin whatever cat they are handed. I'd like to say that the debt Ponzi fandango is *tee hee* better than working for a living", but it isn't. The false dichotomy between "works with his hands / works with his brain" is nothing more and it's losing traction in the face of stellar GPAs and 300k degrees selling stereos.

"Because then, you might actually beat the debt wheel and we won't break even on your ass by the time you're too old to work, chew or walk to the corner store and that's sort of how the game works. We pretty much want you fitted for a granite condo by the time we steal your pension."

quietwalker:Most white collar jobs are like that because they focus on your intellectual skill set instead of your physical capabilities.

And in case you're interested - and from your rather long and mind profile, I assume it's a great interest to you - .7 percentile of everybody who ever sat the Stanford Binet, Accelerated Learning Program in 4th - 6th grades, turning in college level work in college level classes by 6th grade, quit the program because I got tired of self congratulatory, precious snowflake prats braying endlessly about how wonderful it is to be "special" while doing f*ck all of any use with it and dime store pedagogues taking their "stuck teaching in public school" frustrations out on the brats they were charged with . Regrets? I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention. The point? The window dressing and the potential is a lovely little trophy, but if your results suck fat hippo ass, so do you and so do your methods, colloquially speaking. All the ostensibly high minded "people of promise" have, so far, manged to offer the world is nothing more than new and more gymnastic methods of sucking money's dick. Oddly, I find this to be vastly unimpressive.

cheesewheel:Shame on Cooper Union's administration and board for so grossly mismanaging finances as to run the school into the ground, and now making the students pay for what they have done. Are any of those administrators taking a pay cut? Didn't think so.

They have violated Peter Cooper's mission. If they are to charge tuition, then the school needs to be called something else as it is no longer Cooper Union. Where once students were selected based on merit alone, the school will now join the mediocre ranks of any other for-profit institution.

Charging money for tuition is not for-profit. It's for-operating-costs. There are for-profit colleges, but they are few compared to not-for-profit colleges.

Also, The California Master Plan for Higher Education, which established the UC, CSU and CCC systems, states that there shall be no tuition for students, yet I don't hear you asking for them to change all their names because they violated their establishment charter and started charging tuition decades ago because free isn't very sustainable, even with taxpayer support.

bunner:quietwalker: Most white collar jobs are like that because they focus on your intellectual skill set

And so far these captains of industry have gotten us.. here? I sort of doubt that Stanford Binet scores are the top shopping metric when checking the teeth on the latest crop of corporate whore wannabes.

quietwalker: Besides, what's the alternative?

Honesty? Decency? Value for dollar as a goal other than a nuisance to the quarterly P&L?

quietwalker: That's the lower end of the bell curve that doesn't get the choice to pick any other type of job.

PhDs with spatulas are prolix. It may be a comfort to assure oneself that you have the GOOD treadmill cause "I'm one of the smart ones!", but the state of the con speaks to other qualities being necessary to skin whatever cat they are handed. I'd like to say that the debt Ponzi fandango is *tee hee* better than working for a living", but it isn't. The false dichotomy between "works with his hands / works with his brain" is nothing more and it's losing traction in the face of stellar GPAs and 300k degrees selling stereos.

I'm not quite able to parse everything you typed, it seems like some sort of political activist-buzzword? vocabulary I'm not familiar with, so sorry in advance if I miss a point or two.

It's also hard to go point by point since you have covered such a broad range of subjects, but let me summarize my thoughts thusly:

- I agree, IQ is not a sufficient measure of financial or career success. Studies have shown that popularity is a better measure; intangibles such as confidence and soft people skills apparently influence interviews, promotions, bonuses, etc more than many other objective measures. Look at our presidental elections: they prove who's most popular, not who's best suited to run a country.

- Having a degree of any type or not, or being successful in your chosen career or job does not necessarily reflect on your ethical or moral value as a person. Not every successful person is indecent, not every poor person is. That's your false dichotomy. Corporations do not automatically equal 'evil': the world is not so simple. - Statistically, manual labor results in lower net worth, less benefits (health, vacation, 401k, etc), higher turnover, less translatable skills, greater injury rate, greater fatigue, and results in a lower quality of life with greater chance for debt. About the only thing going for it is that it tends to have a lower barrier to entry.

- How much you pay for your degree has little to do with the value of your degree, rather the subject is more important. For example, non-STEM degrees tend to result in lower net earnings, higher unemployment. Having a degree does not guarantee employment, regardless of the cost of the degree.

... and over all of this; purchasing something on credit which provides no reasonable return on investment, absent any other form of renumeration, is a very poor choice indeed. It's obviously a luxury, and going into debt for a luxury you have no way to repay is hardly intelligent.

bunner:quietwalker: Most white collar jobs are like that because they focus on your intellectual skill set instead of your physical capabilities.

And in case you're interested - and from your rather long and mind profile, I assume it's a great interest to you - .7 percentile of everybody who ever sat the Stanford Binet, Accelerated Learning Program in 4th - 6th grades, turning in college level work in college level classes by 6th grade, quit the program because I got tired of self congratulatory, precious snowflake prats braying endlessly about how wonderful it is to be "special" while doing f*ck all of any use with it and dime store pedagogues taking their "stuck teaching in public school" frustrations out on the brats they were charged with . Regrets? I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention. The point? The window dressing and the potential is a lovely little trophy, but if your results suck fat hippo ass, so do you and so do your methods, colloquially speaking. All the ostensibly high minded "people of promise" have, so far, manged to offer the world is nothing more than new and more gymnastic methods of sucking money's dick. Oddly, I find this to be vastly unimpressive.

I do need to work on brevity :) Lemme try here.

Perhaps your reasoning is based primarily on bias and anecdotal evidence? You apparently have your own axe to grind on the subject and your emotional involvement may be resulting in the above incoherent ... message? .... and lack of focus or rational points.

quietwalker:Perhaps your reasoning is based primarily on bias and anecdotal evidence? You apparently have your own axe to grind on the subject and your emotional involvement may be resulting in the above incoherent ... message? .... and lack of focus or rational points.

That, or your playing prig with a broken projector and a template that probably was the jazz in Phil-102. Who can say?

So, like, unless I've got a specific flag sewn on my coat, I'm talking complete monkey snot, OBVIOUSLY the product of a weak intellect and an overwrought EMOTIONAL reaction to blah blah blah, because you just said so? I can do this all day, but I won't. If the next reel is a dime store condescension fandango, I'm heading for the snack bar.

dj_bigbird:thamike: dj_bigbird: It's cute how the students think college is about them.

What does this even mean?

It means that colleges don't really exist to educate students anymore. That their goals are irrelevant. What counts at college is the number of admins, professors, bigger budgets, more buildings, more benefits for the staff, sports (to raise revenue) etc. etc. The students are just the conduit of money from the federal government (student loans, grants) to the college. The students are then saddled with inescapable debt. Great blog about this mess here: http://edububble.com/dpp/

Oh, I see. You mean the students think the administration has their best interests at heart. Because college was all about me. I couldn't care less what the college I went to thought about me, at least not beyond my professors. Finding an adviser or administrator who is at least partly interested in being good at their jobs is like deep sea noodling.

I also have never met a student who thinks that college administrators have the students' best interests at heart. Especially the ones with loans or even scholarships.

Still, I lucked out with the Virginia university system. Common byzantine bullsh*t aside, it's top notch.